Simcenter on the Cloud

On-demand, Pay-per-use, Cloud Computing

Engineers increasingly need to speed up their product validation process for solving large models or for performing sensitivity analyses over a large number of parameters. To do this with their current infrastructure can be prohibitively time-consuming or computationally intensive.

To overcome this challenge, Siemens PLM Software offers the Simcenter 3D solvers for structural, thermal and flow analysis and STAR-CCM+ for multi-discipline simulation. All are available in a cloud environment so users around the globe now have easier access to the simulation tools they need.

Siemens has partnered with Rescale, a cloud engineering simulation platform, to offer the following solvers on-demand:

NX Nastran: Nastran has been an industry-standard FE solver for over 40 years, known and trusted for its strength in structural analysis for stress, vibration, dynamics and other types of solutions.

Simcenter Thermal: A comprehensive thermal solver for heat transfer solutions including conduction, convection and radiation phenomena for complex products and large assemblies. Simcenter Thermal can also be used with Simcenter Flow for coupled thermo-fluid simulation.

Flexible Licensing Options

NX Nastran, Simcenter Thermal and Simcenter Flow are all available on the Rescale platform under two different licensing models:

Platform-as-a-service (PaaS): Also known as bring-your-own-license (BYOL), you can purchase a license from Siemens PLM Software as you would for a traditional software license, and then use that license in conjunction with the Simcenter 3D solver that is deployed on the Rescale platform. This lets you leverage you existing investments in Simcenter’s solvers.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS): You can purchase solver usage via a subscription or a per-run per-hour usage model. Both the license and the software are provided by Rescale along with a choice of hardware configurations to run the simulations. The SaaS option may be preferred if you wish to minimize upfront costs associated with purchasing software and hardware.

STAR-CCM+ is available under the following licensing model:

"Power on demand": You can access STAR-CCM+ by the hour on an unlimited number of cores from any private, public or hybrid cloud. This is ideal for cloud, burst capacity, and infrequent usage and allows you to maximize throughput of large simulations previously not possible due to limited resources.

Platform Scalability

Performance is what makes Simcenter solvers the solution of choice for users who need to solve today’s increasingly large problems. Siemens PLM Software has heavily invested in solver performance. For example, NX Nastran can be used to solve large scale dynamics problems that can be divided into several pieces and sent to multiple processors. With just 4 CPUs, the solution required almost 400 minutes (which is more than 6.5 hours). But spreading the solution out over 512 CPUs reduced the solution time to just 38.5 minutes – almost 10 times faster.

STAR-CCM+ is massively parallelized, from meshing to solution, and it scales to hundreds of thousands of cores. This helps you to achieve extreme scalability for large simulations and get back results in hours instead of days, allowing you to push the boundaries of your multidisciplinary engineering simulations.

Simcenter on the Rescale platform lets you get on-demand hardware scalability to fulfill short-term needs, such as an investigation into an urgent warranty issue. Rescale’s cloud infrastructure has already been configured and optimized to take full advantage of each solver’s performance, which means you don’t need to invest in an IT infrastructure to support to use Simcenter solvers on an high performance computing (HPC) cluster.

Design of Experiments (DOE)

Design of experiments simulations are a very useful methodology for understanding product performance when there is variability so you can design products to be more robust to parameter variations. Traditional licensing models often make it challenging to run DOE simulations due to the large number of licenses that are needed for parallel runs to be executed. On Rescale, Simcenter runs used as part of a DOE solution are solved using parallel pricing, but are volume discounted so that the cost per-run per-hour decreases as more runs are executed.

Secure and Easy-to-use

Maintaining data security is an important consideration for every company that is contemplating investing in a cloud-based solution. On Rescale, customer data is encrypted end-to-end and jobs are run on private, closed clusters. Information technology (IT) administrators can manage access and security controls at every level of the organization. In addition, Simcenter on the cloud is compliant end-to-end with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and Service Organization Controls (SOC 2) compliance requirements.

Simcenter’s solvers are also already tuned to optimal performance on the cloud, so you also don’t need to invest in IT infrastructure and middleware to support the solvers. To use Simcenter’s solvers, you just simply login to the Rescale platform using a standard web browser, select the desired hardware configuration, upload the input deck and specify the solver. Input decks may be prepared using NX Nastran software, Femap™ software or any other preprocessor that can be used to write Simcenter solver input decks. After the job has been completed, the user downloads the output files to their local machine for post processing.

Rescale

Rescale (www.rescale.com) was founded in 2011 and has grown rapidly to become a leading cloud simulation provider, offering an integrated solution that combines simulation software with customizable hardware infrastructure for companies to perform scientific and engineering simulations. Rescale serves both large enterprises and small-to-medium-sized businesses in a diverse range of industries, including aerospace, automotive, life sciences and energy.